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This article originally appeared in December 2005.

Another Open Standards Story: UBL

With attention focused last month on Microsoft's bid to upstage the new Open Document Format, another big news story about an industry-changing open standard went virtually unnoticed. While most Americans were enjoying the Thanksgiving holiday, a team from the government of Denmark was given the eEurope Award for their implementation of electronic invoicing — just one of four teams to receive the prestigious award out of 234 projects competing.

Why is this significant? Because it signals that Denmark is setting a direction for the European Union that will eventually become adopted by governments throughout Europe and much of the world. And that direction is based on another breakthrough OASIS open standards effort sponsored by Sun Microsystems — the Universal Business Language (UBL), a royalty-free set of standard XML forms for common business documents such as invoices, purchase orders, and shipping notices.

The business case for government use of UBL couldn't be much simpler. Companies that sell to governments have to invoice the government to get paid. Processing those invoices involves a huge amount of manual labor, and hand processing is a major source of error. Eliminate some of that work and you save taxpayer money — a lot of it.

Since the government of Denmark mandated electronic invoicing in February of this year, more than 10 million UBL invoices have been exchanged in the Danish public sector. The Danish Ministry of Finance expects to save upwards of 100 million euros by switching to UBL for the estimated 15 million invoices it will process next year. And these savings are projected to double in 2007 when the ordering process goes electronic with UBL purchase orders. No wonder the EU Ministers for eGovernment policy have declared that by 2010, at least 50 percent of European government procurement will be carried out electronically; it's an economic no-brainer.

Like XML and ODF, UBL is another example of Sun's ability to organize and lead a broad industry-wide effort to solve a major interoperability problem. Contributors to the OASIS UBL 1.0 Standard, released in November 2004, include some 70 business and technical experts representing companies as diverse as SAP, France Telecom, Oracle, and Boeing, and organizations such as NIST, ACORD (insurance), CIDX (chemicals), the U.S. General Services Administration, and the U.S. Department of the Navy. Sun contributed the services of Jon Bosak (who organized and led the working group that created XML), Eduardo Gutentag (who has gone on to chair the OASIS Board of Directors), Eve Maler (who followed up by leading the working group that developed SAML), and Anne Hendry (who now program-manages our Service Registry product). Not because we had UBL products in the works, but just because it was the right thing to do.

These Sun standards veterans, whose experience with XML and its predecessor, SGML, averages more than a decade apiece, brought to the UBL effort not only a world-class body of technical expertise, but also the understanding that a successful standard for business documents had to bridge the worlds of electronic and paper-based business practices. It's not enough to create the electronic equivalent of a purchase order or an invoice; you have to map that to a paper representation that's understandable within the existing legal system. That's the significance of an even less-noticed recent piece of UBL news, this one from the XML 2005 conference in Atlanta. G. Ken Holman, an independent Canadian UBL participant and noted authority on XSL who operates his own business as Crane Softwrights, announced that a free XSL-FO runtime is now available to process UBL instances conformant to the UN Layout Key using his UBL XSL-FO stylesheets.

Never heard of the UN Layout Key, you say? Well, the standards world is bigger than just IT. The UN Layout Key has served for over 40 years as the international standard format for paper invoices, purchase orders, shipping notices, and a number of other paper documents used in global trade. XSL-FO is, of course, the W3C XML standard for document formatting. (You knew that, right?) In collaboration with a Layout Key expert from the UN Economic Commission for Europe, Ken ran a UBL subcommittee that mapped all of the UBL documents to the corresponding UN Layout Keys, and then he created and gave away for free a set of UBL XSL-FO stylesheets that will allow any UBL 1.0 instance (a particular invoice, for example) to be processed by any conformant XSL-FO formatter to produce the PDF of a perfectly formatted UN Layout Key paper representation — no small feat given the fiendishly difficult formatting challenges presented by the UNLK. There was just one remaining problem: conformant XSL-FO formatters aren't cheap.

For a while, the UBL people got around this by recommending another incredibly slick piece of programming, this one donated by a former Sun employee, Jacek Ambroziak (the same guy who first proposed and implemented an XSLT compiler — but that's another story). Jacek figured out a way to compile Ken's UBL XSL-FO stylesheets into a Java executable (freely available from his Ambrosoft web site) that will transform any UBL document instance into an HTML version that looks a lot like the UNLK. Very useful for displaying UBL documents on a PDA, for example, but not quite perfect PDF yet.

At the recent XML 2005 conference, however, Ken announced another breakthrough: in cooperation with Visual Programming, Ltd., creator of an industrial-strength XSL-FO formatter named Ibex, he has developed a digitally signed version of his stylesheets that can be freely distributed along with the Ibex runtime. All of this can be downloaded from the CraneSoftwrights and Visual Programming web sites.

Believe it or not, the interesting thing about all this isn't the extremely cool XML and Java technology involved, but rather the fact that all the business people in the world now have an internationally standardized machine-readable XML format for electronic business documents from which they can, at any moment, generate an internationally standardized paper representation — all for free. If you're a business person, that's cool.

You can get some idea of just how cool by looking at the response from the international business community. UBL standardizes a dictionary of more than 600 basic business concepts, associating each one (in the form of an XML element or attribute) with a precise English-language definition. Upon the first appearance of these definitions, groups spontaneously formed in several different countries to translate the definitions and contribute the translations to the UBL effort. The result, with definitions in English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish, has been published as the UBL 1.0 International Data Dictionary. Check it out — there's nothing else like it in the world. And it's all free.

A lot of what's happening with UBL looks like a replay of XML almost a decade ago. Just as with XML, a group of world-class experts organized and led by Sun has flown under the radar to create a paradigm-shifting technology almost entirely ignored by the rest of the computer industry. It will probably come as no surprise that in the entire four years of OASIS UBL development, IBM and Microsoft have evidenced not a trace of interest in UBL and have contributed exactly zero resources to the effort. One day they will no doubt wake up to what's happening, and the next day they'll try to take credit for it. But the time to jump on the UBL bandwagon without looking completely clueless is rapidly running out.

The fact is that UBL is on track to change the entire business software industry. UBL is not just a replay of EDI, the 20-year-old technology that still accounts for more than half of all electronic commerce. EDI was never able to standardize to the extent that it could break out of the Fortune 500; every EDI implementation is unique, and every one is expensive. UBL adoption will take place very differently, driven from the top down by governments that have both the need and the authority to impose cost-cutting solutions for electronic procurement. Denmark has shown how to cut through the fog of individual trading partner requirements: it simply wrote the UBL Invoice into Danish law, literally translating the whole XML invoice schema into a national statute and thus mandating a standard that must be supported by 440,000 Danish businesses — and every software company that hopes to sell to them. The effect is to create, for the first time, a target for cheap, off-the-shelf business software. And that's going to change the economics of that whole industry.

This doesn't stop with Denmark. In September, the Swedish National Financial Management Authority "recommended" a subset of UBL Invoice for use by 250 Swedish government agencies, estimating that over the next five years, UBL standardization will save the Swedish government four billion kroner — more than 500 million dollars. And UBL schemas are already starting to be bundled into XML products like Altova's XML Spy 2006 and EDI products like GEFEG's EDIFIX.

Government support will be even stronger for UBL 2.0, due out in 2006. That version will feature a greatly expanded set of procurement documents created by EU government and taxation experts with funding from the UK government, plus a set of basic transportation documents developed with funding from the governments of China and Singapore. Hot tip for business software entrepreneurs: time to pay attention.

Did Sun Microsystems create UBL and then try to get some organization to rubber-stamp it? No. We identified the problem and then exercised our leadership skills to organize the work in a way that benefits everyone. That's what we do.